How Michael B. Jordan Is Redeﬁning the Role of the All-American Actor

“The story is so spot-on,” Jordan says of his forthcoming HBO movie Fahrenheit 451. “As we were making it, the things we were showing were eerily mirroring the world.” Jordan in a Paskho tank top and Levi’s 501 jeans.Photographed by Steven Klein, Vogue, December 2017

“I grew up in a tough neighborhood,” says Michael B. Jordan, the actor with the preternaturally sweet smile. “There were lots of drugs, lots of gangs, lots of pitfalls wherever you stepped. I love Newark, but it was easy to get caught up in the wrong situation. You know, when you come from very humble beginnings, you always have that fear that everything could go away at any moment.”

As it turned out, this fear found expression in his breakthrough role in Ryan Coogler’s Oakland-set Fruitvale Station, the Sundance-winning 2013 art-house hit about 22-year-old Oscar Grant III, a real-life African-American father who, though unarmed, was fatally shot in the back by a transit officer. Not only did his performance prove that Jordan could carry a movie, it established him as an actor whose work is bound to our historical moment. Black Lives Matter was born the same year the film came out.

At the time, Jordan told me he was planning on becoming a Hollywood leading man. Four years later, he is one. Indeed, his striking blend of live-wire physicality, down-home wholesomeness, and wide-ranging gifts as an actor has people asking if Jordan is a new kind of star for the millennial era.

“Mike is very ambitious,” says MTV host Sterling “Steelo” Brim, whom Jordan calls his alter ego—they’ve been best friends since meeting at age twelve on the set of a Keanu Reeves movie. “He wants to go from being an A-lister to a superstar to a legend. A lot of people in the industry look at skin color and say, ‘He’s the next Denzel Washington’ or ‘the next Will Smith.’ Mike thinks he could be the next Tom Hanks.” That is, the 30-year-old actor doesn’t aspire to be a “crossover” black star but rather, like Hanks, to be viewed as the very exemplar of the things we love about American culture—good humor, instinctive decency, and an inner grit.

One of his great champions is Kevin Tsujihara, the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros., who came to know and admire Jordan when the actor starred in 2015’s Creed. “Michael’s got likability,” he says, referring to both his persona and his range. Yet it’s the compelling paradox of Jordan’s career that he isn’t taking the safe route to mainstream screen-icon status. He’s made his name doing work charged with racial and political significance deeply rooted in a sense of place—including the crime-riddled Baltimore of The Wire (where he played the beloved Wallace), the small-town Texas of Friday Night Lights (where he played troubled football star Vince Howard), and the blue-collar Philadelphia of Creed. In that 2015 hit, the story of the world’s best-loved white boxer, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa, was reoriented toward Adonis Creed, an African-American underdog played by Jordan with wounded bravado. A Creed sequel was recently announced.

In 2018, Jordan will take on two wildly different roles that further underline his ambition. In February, he stars with Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o in Coogler’s Black Panther, a Marvel Studios blockbuster. “It’s a $200 million movie with an all-black cast and a black director,” says Jordan, “so if it doesn’t work, who knows if there’s going to be another one.” He is also set to play the hero of Fahrenheit 451, HBO’s forthcoming adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel about a book-burning society.

Jordan initially had reservations; his character, Guy Montag, is a so-called fireman, a policeman who finds and burns books. “With what’s going on in my community,” he says, “black folks being shot and killed, I didn’t want to play a fucking cop.” But director Ramin Bahrani (99 Homes) promised to tailor the 1950s character into one better suited to his star. Jordan’s now extremely pleased by the show’s message. “The story is so spot-on about what’s going on,” he says. “As we were making it, the things we were showing were eerily mirroring the world.”

On a recent Saturday, dressed in a blindingly white Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt and dark joggers, the chiseled six-footer enters the Garden restaurant at Soho House in West Hollywood with the confident grace of one who had no trouble playing a varsity quarterback or a world-class boxer. He exudes a movie star’s atmosphere-altering aura as he works the room—waving to acquaintances, greeting friends with shoulder-to-chest handshakes, flashing his killer grin at our waitress, who, before he arrived, told me, “You’re so lucky. He’s an incredibly nice person.”

Finally he plops down across the table: “You hungry? I’m a fat kid, and I’m going to order a bunch of things.” Which he promptly proceeds to do: an enormous breakfast of a quesadilla with eggs, a rice bowl with extra chicken, and (why not?) a plate of chicken sausage.

In person, Jordan is so friendly and upbeat, it takes a while to realize how cautious he’s being. Sure, he’ll tell you that he owns a pricey Acura NSX sports car or express his dismay at the president’s racial pronouncements. (“He is blatant, in your face.”) But you sense there’s a great deal going on beneath the surface. Where most actors present themselves as artists, Jordan seems most comfortable talking business. He explains how, in an industry notorious for shunting African-American actors into side roles (“You get tired of going in for the role of Gangbanger #1 and seeing the same usual suspects at the audition”), he consciously set out to, as he puts it, “reverse-engineer” the careers of those who became stars. For starters, he founded and runs his own company, Outlier Society Productions, whose name—from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, a book about people who don’t fit ordinary standards of achievement but rise because they find opportunities and put in endless work—bespeaks Jordan’s sense of himself. Of course, seizing opportunities is itself an art, and Jordan is fastidious about the roles he takes.

“Don’t chase the money,” he says firmly. “Don’t chase the money. I’ve said no to a lot of things because they didn’t make me a leading man. They put me in a category I wasn’t interested in. When I do work, I want people to go, Damn, it’s Mike’s next movie. Look at Leo,” he says, referencing the Titanic star who’s one of his models. “Leo . . . takes his time.”

Of course, turning down the money takes no small self-discipline, something Jordan likely absorbed from his father, a former Marine who ran a catering business out of their house (young Mike often chopped vegetables), while his artist mother, Donna, worked at a school. (The actor sees himself as combining his mom’s creative and emotional side with his father’s discipline and strategic thinking.) The middle child—his older sister, Jamila, 33, is a TV producer, while younger brother Khalid, 25, works for Nas’s company Mass Appeal—Michael was something of a pistol (he liked setting toilet paper on fire) but stayed out of trouble. To this day, he says, his family is “super-super close”; indeed, his parents moved to Los Angeles so the family could be together. Although he plans to get a place in L.A.’s booming downtown, the still-single actor has spent the last two years living at their house in Sherman Oaks, in part to be there for his mother, who suffers from lupus.

He got started in the business through one of his mother’s friends, who had sons who did some modeling in Newark. He then appeared in local ads for Toys “R” Us and by age twelve had landed small roles on two TV juggernauts, Cosby and The Sopranos. By fourteen, he was appearing in The Wire, where his character’s eventual murder was perhaps the bleakest scene in a show renowned for its oppressiveness. Even as the experience showed him how much he loved acting—“I lost myself in a role”—it didn’t lead to overnight success. He vividly remembers the day that he and Brim, both broke, swallowed their pride and decided to apply for jobs at Jack in the Box. After years on shows that were good (Friday Night Lights) and not so good (All My Children), Jordan finally got his big movie break with Fruitvale Station. There he met the director with whom he’d go on to make Creed and Black Panther. “Ryan [Coogler] is Michael’s Scorsese,” says Warner Bros.’ Tsujihara, a comparison that would make Jordan Coogler’s Leonardo DiCaprio or Robert De Niro. “We had this shorthand as soon as we met,” Coogler tells me. “We’re the same age, we come from similar families and from cities with similar codes.” He laughs. “Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Mike’s insanely talented.”

Jordan gets to show off the dark side of that talent in Black Panther, in which he plays Erik Killmonger (his name says it all), who battles his counterpart for control of the fictional Wakanda, a secretive, technologically advanced African nation.

“I wanted a villain,” he says, pushing aside the plate of sausages in defeat. “I was getting tired of ‘He’s a good guy, a likable guy; he’s so nice.’ ” Jordan took the preparation seriously: “I lived Erik for a long time,” he says. “I drank a lot. I grew my hair out. I grew my full beard. I walked around with a chip on my shoulder and had a short fuse for, like, nine months. I just didn’t care. People treated me totally differently. White people were definitely intimidated. I became their worst nightmare.”

Did any part of him enjoy cutting loose in this way?

“Yeah,” he says with a slightly abashed grin. “It did feel good. I had an excuse not to worry about how somebody was going to take what I said. It was liberating.”

If he is open about his process, he is guarded when it comes to his private life. This isn’t surprising given he raised the ire of some fans merely by being seen with Kendall Jenner outside a party (they weren’t, he insists, an item), and, like virtually all unmarried Hollywood actors, he has faced claims that he’s secretly gay. When I ask whether he’s currently involved with anyone, he gives his Polo S watch a slight get-me-out-of-here glance, mutters some stuff about how hard it is to date in L.A. (bad traffic, opportunistic people), then says he’s too busy to allow himself the distraction of romance. He spends his free time working out, playing the NBA 2K and Call of Duty video games with friends, and, his father’s son, cooking whenever he can. He makes, he tells me, a mean broccoli-and-Parmesan risotto.

But really, he insists, his life is all about working. He has endorsement deals with Nike, Acura, and Piaget (which explains the Polo S). He and his company are developing a reboot of The Thomas Crown Affair (“It’s one of my favorites”), working on an animated project currently titled Super Day Care for 2019, and putting together a television show with playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (who co-wrote Moonlight). He also recently signed on to executive-produce and act in Raising Dion, the upcoming Netflix show about a single mother bringing up a superhero. When I ask where he gets his drive, he says he doesn’t know but tells me how, as a boy in New Jersey, he would look over at the looming New York City skyline.

“My dreams are huge, man. I dream all day every day. Do I want to get into restaurants one day? Yeah! Do I want to get into hospitality and have my own hotels? Yeah, I do! Do I want to have a huge production company that’s wheeling and dealing with every studio and actor and creating animated projects and video games and good movies and good television shows? Yeah, yeah, yeah!” He gives me that killer smile. “And I can see it already.”